For my thesis project we are using lego mindstorms to build a maze travelling robot.
The lego RCX Invention system is really cool, but somewhat pricy. The default lego programming language is a drag and drop, connect the boxes type of graphical languages so kids could play with it all day after you do a quick presentation.
If you wanted to get more control check out BrickOS (C compiler) or Lejos (Java compiler).
GUIs let you explore until you find what you want by pointing and clicking on things. With command lines, you need to know the commands, and the options, before starting.
./program_name --help man program_name
There, you are now equipped with knowledge for every program. I don't know any icons can do better than that.
And yes, I know HCI is more than icons. As I'm sure the parent poster also knows.
Lastly, if this is a summer (read fun) camp, there will be some time for gaming. I obviously wouldn't recommend a live CD for this, but if you are looking for free(beer) software that is multiplatform, I'd recommend America's Army and Enemy Territory
Lol, you wouldn't happen to work for the DoD, would you? Those are some heavy duty shoot-em-ups.
I don't know all that much about risk managment, or political correctness, but there is no way that kids should be playing those games. Stick with tux racer and frozen bubbles! w00t!
FWIW, the server that was allegedly slashdotted (but really wasn't, the school shut of port 80 because of excessive outgoing traffic, really a marvel that Computing and Information Services monitors the network so well) is a...
was by far the best this year. Not only was there the pac man board in the student centre, but the SFWR Graveyard was great too (although, politically, with everything going on in the world, I think some of the crazy artsies may have been offended - or mistook the prank for a political stance, meh).
Go to school, get a decent background in things other than programming (ie, thermo, materials, control systems, chemistry, calc, discrete math). Then when you graduate you can call yourself an engineer. Oh, what's that, you don't want to put in the time and effort required, then you don't deserve to call yourself an Engineer.
Another link at the PEO that's intersting is the software page.
But I like text mode only start-up. I live for it! What good are your graphics when your mouse and/or keyboard doesn't work, then what is your dumbass gonna do? Eh?
Re:Design first, or refactor? Re:Origins of XP
on
Why We Refactored JUnit
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Here is an honest question, I know very little about XP, but how does it keep the rate of change consistent with all this "refactoring" going on?
As your code base increases from cycle to cycle and more features are added to the system do you not end up spending most of your time "refactoring" your old code so that the new feature fits into the system?
Design first, or refactor? Re:Origins of XP
on
Why We Refactored JUnit
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
making a design at the start of the project that meets the requirements as of the end of the project is almost always impossible
I believe that this quote is true for commercial software. The word processors, email clients and web browsers in the world should not be designed at the beginning of a project. The cost of doing that far outweighs the benifits. But...
When you are designing life critical applications (fly-by-wire, ABS, pacemaker, cancer radiation machine...etc) it is not acceptable to be redesigning while coding.
If you cannot model the way a system must react at all times, under any input, then what makes you think that your software should be responsible for someones life.
More and more software is being designed for life critical applications. If XP is being used to develop them, I'm worried. You cannot stumble onto 100% correct software. In a large system it takes a lot of money - an exponential curve, the last 3 bugs will likely take more money than the first 100 - time and a good design.
"Let's suppose that the speed limit becomes 20 mph at highways. If everybody ignore this limit then the police won't be able to fine everybody.... if a considerable number of citizens ignore the way copyright works today it will be impossible to sue everyone, and of course they won't sue none of us!"
You may want to rethink your logic there. What would really happen if everyone drove 40mph over the speed limit besides the police handing out lots of expensive speeding tickets?
This kind of takes me back to the playground in elementary school.
"Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't make it ok." -- Mr. Harder, my grade 5 teacher.
Is the bolded part of the quote a double negative?
Yes, you will get sued.
The probability of being caught is much lower because there are so many others who are also doing something wrong. You may be lucky and get away with it, but over time your chances of getting caught will approach 1.
Just to throw some math out there to help screw up the difference between clock speed and processor speed. These equations give a performance ratio n...
Performance(a)/Performance(b) = n Execution Time(b)/Execution Time(a) = n
CPU execution time for a program = (CPU clock cycles)(Clock cycle time for a program) -or- CPU Ex. Time for a program = (CPU clock cycles for a program)/(clock rate)
Where (CPU clock cycles for a program) = (Instructions for a program)(Average clock cycles per instruction)
Now we are dependant on the chips architecture as stated in the above response by Slashdotess. Are we running CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer [IE. Intel]) or RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer [IE. SPARC, MIPS]). I'm not sure what Mac's are running.
Try wget, but use redhat.newaol.com, check the mirror list at freshrpm.net (you'll need the full path to the files to use wget [aka, use ftp and browse the server]). You can also use the -c [continue a broken download] and -b [background] flags so that you can go on and do other things as the iso's get sucked through your pipe in the background.
You also only need the first 3 iso's to install! The other 2 (4 & 5) are SRPM's.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that the new site has not been released yet. But yes, it is quite bloated isn't it? And good luck trying to navigate it too.
The one thing I like about the company who has been hired is that they are really improving the navigation, well from what I have seen so far.
I agree that we are a dying breed of people who want the content and not the pictures and crap. But it's the majority that counts right? Maybe that's a little pessimistic. But since so many "non-technical" users have entered the computer world this is the result.
My school [www.mcmaster.ca] is re-designing it's page. It's about time for a new web page since it's currently old and bulky. But the company that has been hired to do it worries me a bit. Their site is built on flash mostly.[www.cossetteinteractive.com]
Mac's site will not be a flash based application, because the content is the most important but I have a feeling we are looking at IE & Netscape > 5.0 browsers for CSS and java code (my mozilla doesn't have a java plugin!).
Anyway, it's going to be interesting to see how the university reacts to this change. It's nice when things look pretty, but if it doesn't say anything, or not everyone can read it, then you've just spoiled your "target market" and your "branding" doesn't matter any more?
Are we going backwards in evolution? We just got a lot of functions off of the hardware and abstracted them to software!
Knowing M$'s track record with bugs and Intel's classical hardware mistake the floating point bug. You would have thought people would have learned thier lesson after the millions of dollars that fiasco cost.
Another quick thought is that if M$ is making the software opensource, who thinks the hardware functions and code are going to be open too? Not me.
Everyone seems so worried about kids having these little devices and not harnessing the power within them.
I currently use my PDA all the time (PalmIII, cauze that's all my OSAP poor ass can afford). It holds contact info, appointments, SCHEDULES MY CLASSES (its really important not to forget to go to a class). Now that's what it was ment for. Nothing too fancy, we aren't talking about 2 Gig's of data and an on board compiler (I couldn't imagine programing on one of those, a compile would take for ever).
I do keep the prof's lecture notes (PDF), but I don't take notes on it.
Palm has a little keyboard attachemnt that folds up. It seems pretty quiet, a classmate has one, but you have to be a fast typer. =)
There will come a time that digital recoding will be available to the common poor folk like me. I find it a little too expensive since I already own a VCR and besides, my TV can't tell the difference between digital and analog right now.
But the really funny part is that we won't have to record stuff anymore when it does become available because it will be streamed on demand. From where and whom and for how much I don't know. I'll leave that up to people with business degrees.
The IBM software lab in Markham (Toronto-ish) has all it's laptops (pretty much everybody get's one) on a wireless network.
Take your laptop and go. I like that idea. Apparently you can work 50 feet from the building, which brings up security conserns. But I'll leave that up to ppl smarter than myself.
Cheers.
MTV :: The name, not the product.
on
I Want My MTV... PC?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Anyone dumb enough to buy this system (there are many out there that we all know) is going to be an impulse buyer. They won't do any homework on what system to get nor will they care.
I like music, and I like the idea's of having a radio and tv tuner in my box. But I won't pay the cash that MTV (or whoever building these systems) is bound to charge when I can put them in myself for a lot less.
For those out there who know nothing of computers, they will happily follow each other over the cliff like mindless zombies, just as they do today with Micro$ofts products. It's all about marketing and creating a WANT when people don't NEED it. Maybe that crazy movie Fight Club was right?
I've always wanted one of those hotwheel computers! =)
Rotations Per Minute only affects seek times as far as I know (which isn't much). That's why A: drives suck so much (that and they don't carry a Gig of data).
I suppose if you had a really defragmented drive it could slow down reading speeds.
This little buffer of 128K (a little over half is used for microcode) should keep things reading soothly though.
Inside out Outside of the "Student Gehto?"
on
Apartments for Techies?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As a student at McMaster (Canada) there's a tonne of houses around the University that are 'swiss cheesed' with wires running here and their through walls, taped to walls (God bless duct tape) baseboards or anything else you can think of.
To break away from university life - but who would want to - you are going to have to move into a new complex. Who can afford a new home though, not this poor student?
The cheapest and most efficent way I'm sure is to get a dedicated line, T3 perhaps and share the bandwidth with other neighbours in the area (5, 10 people should bring the bill down). Check contracts for that though, some providers don't like you networking too many computers because you turn into an ISP. Don't get your connection though them if that's the case.
Competition is great. Cheers.
Re:Arrogance more powerful than its technology?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
Are you telling me that if I were to lean off this thing w/ my ample 200 pound frame it wouldn't tip over? What's the weight restrictions on this puppy?
This will make a good test case for nothing.
Oh, and a case of beer to the first person who finds a systems critical bug in the software for this contraption! What do you mean it's not open source?
TIME (2015)
"The scooters unite and take over the world due to unexpected flashing of ROM units by a childs PDA."
Slashdot Mirror
For my thesis project we are using lego mindstorms to build a maze travelling robot.
The lego RCX Invention system is really cool, but somewhat pricy. The default lego programming language is a drag and drop, connect the boxes type of graphical languages so kids could play with it all day after you do a quick presentation.
If you wanted to get more control check out BrickOS (C compiler) or Lejos (Java compiler).
Cheers,
Chris
man program_name
There, you are now equipped with knowledge for every program. I don't know any icons can do better than that.
And yes, I know HCI is more than icons. As I'm sure the parent poster also knows.
NessLol, you wouldn't happen to work for the DoD, would you? Those are some heavy duty shoot-em-ups.
I don't know all that much about risk managment, or political correctness, but there is no way that kids should be playing those games. Stick with tux racer and frozen bubbles! w00t!
FWIW, the server that was allegedly slashdotted (but really wasn't, the school shut of port 80 because of excessive outgoing traffic, really a marvel that Computing and Information Services monitors the network so well) is a...
We don't mess around, the server can handle it.
That is all.
was by far the best this year. Not only was there the pac man board in the student centre, but the SFWR Graveyard was great too (although, politically, with everything going on in the world, I think some of the crazy artsies may have been offended - or mistook the prank for a political stance, meh).
The Graveyard was everything that a Software Engineer lays dead to the world after 4 years. For example the ablility to pick up women, Hit by bus error, Deadlock because "Has X waiting for Y" was buried right beside "Has Y waiting for X", and from all the exams we have no chance in ever passing we bury our anal viginity.
Good-bye www.eng.mcmaster.ca Slashdot now has a hold of you, fair well.
Up here in Canada, the Professional Engineers Ontario have the same outlook WRT engineering.
Go to school, get a decent background in things other than programming (ie, thermo, materials, control systems, chemistry, calc, discrete math). Then when you graduate you can call yourself an engineer. Oh, what's that, you don't want to put in the time and effort required, then you don't deserve to call yourself an Engineer.
Another link at the PEO that's intersting is the software page.
Wait a second... web development isn't a factory line job? My world is upsidedown! AHHHHH!
But I like text mode only start-up. I live for it! What good are your graphics when your mouse and/or keyboard doesn't work, then what is your dumbass gonna do? Eh?
Here is an honest question, I know very little about XP, but how does it keep the rate of change consistent with all this "refactoring" going on?
As your code base increases from cycle to cycle and more features are added to the system do you not end up spending most of your time "refactoring" your old code so that the new feature fits into the system?
I believe that this quote is true for commercial software. The word processors, email clients and web browsers in the world should not be designed at the beginning of a project. The cost of doing that far outweighs the benifits. But...
When you are designing life critical applications (fly-by-wire, ABS, pacemaker, cancer radiation machine...etc) it is not acceptable to be redesigning while coding.
If you cannot model the way a system must react at all times, under any input, then what makes you think that your software should be responsible for someones life.
More and more software is being designed for life critical applications. If XP is being used to develop them, I'm worried. You cannot stumble onto 100% correct software. In a large system it takes a lot of money - an exponential curve, the last 3 bugs will likely take more money than the first 100 - time and a good design.
Yes, you will get sued.
The probability of being caught is much lower because there are so many others who are also doing something wrong. You may be lucky and get away with it, but over time your chances of getting caught will approach 1.
Just to throw some math out there to help screw up the difference between clock speed and processor speed.
These equations give a performance ratio n...
Performance(a)/Performance(b) = n
Execution Time(b)/Execution Time(a) = n
CPU execution time for a program = (CPU clock cycles)(Clock cycle time for a program)
-or-
CPU Ex. Time for a program = (CPU clock cycles for a program)/(clock rate)
Where (CPU clock cycles for a program) = (Instructions for a program)(Average clock cycles per instruction)
Now we are dependant on the chips architecture as stated in the above response by Slashdotess. Are we running CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer [IE. Intel]) or RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer [IE. SPARC, MIPS]). I'm not sure what Mac's are running.
When in doubt break out the math.
Chris
Try wget, but use redhat.newaol.com, check the mirror list at freshrpm.net (you'll need the full path to the files to use wget [aka, use ftp and browse the server]). You can also use the -c [continue a broken download] and -b [background] flags so that you can go on and do other things as the iso's get sucked through your pipe in the background.
You also only need the first 3 iso's to install! The other 2 (4 & 5) are SRPM's.
Chris
Sorry, I forgot to mention that the new site has not been released yet. But yes, it is quite bloated isn't it? And good luck trying to navigate it too.
The one thing I like about the company who has been hired is that they are really improving the navigation, well from what I have seen so far.
I agree that we are a dying breed of people who want the content and not the pictures and crap. But it's the majority that counts right? Maybe that's a little pessimistic. But since so many "non-technical" users have entered the computer world this is the result.
Cheers,
Chris
My school [www.mcmaster.ca] is re-designing it's page. It's about time for a new web page since it's currently old and bulky. But the company that has been hired to do it worries me a bit. Their site is built on flash mostly.[www.cossetteinteractive.com]
Mac's site will not be a flash based application, because the content is the most important but I have a feeling we are looking at IE & Netscape > 5.0 browsers for CSS and java code (my mozilla doesn't have a java plugin!).
Anyway, it's going to be interesting to see how the university reacts to this change.
It's nice when things look pretty, but if it doesn't say anything, or not everyone can read it, then you've just spoiled your "target market" and your "branding" doesn't matter any more?
Chris
Nerds or punks, weird how they can share a common logo. =)
Just because you call a young pit bull a "puppy" doesn't mean it won't rip your leg off.
Names are meaningless and right now so is M$'s announcement. Give me some details and meat then we'll see what this is really all about.
Are we going backwards in evolution? We just got a lot of functions off of the hardware and abstracted them to software!
Knowing M$'s track record with bugs and Intel's classical hardware mistake the floating point bug. You would have thought people would have learned thier lesson after the millions of dollars that fiasco cost.
Another quick thought is that if M$ is making the software opensource, who thinks the hardware functions and code are going to be open too? Not me.
Cheers
Chris Ness
I currently use my PDA all the time (PalmIII, cauze that's all my OSAP poor ass can afford). It holds contact info, appointments, SCHEDULES MY CLASSES (its really important not to forget to go to a class). Now that's what it was ment for. Nothing too fancy, we aren't talking about 2 Gig's of data and an on board compiler (I couldn't imagine programing on one of those, a compile would take for ever).
I do keep the prof's lecture notes (PDF), but I don't take notes on it.
Palm has a little keyboard attachemnt that folds up. It seems pretty quiet, a classmate has one, but you have to be a fast typer. =)
There will come a time that digital recoding will be available to the common poor folk like me. I find it a little too expensive since I already own a VCR and besides, my TV can't tell the difference between digital and analog right now.
But the really funny part is that we won't have to record stuff anymore when it does become available because it will be streamed on demand. From where and whom and for how much I don't know. I'll leave that up to people with business degrees.
Cheers
The IBM software lab in Markham (Toronto-ish) has all it's laptops (pretty much everybody get's one) on a wireless network.
Take your laptop and go. I like that idea. Apparently you can work 50 feet from the building, which brings up security conserns. But I'll leave that up to ppl smarter than myself.
Cheers.
Anyone dumb enough to buy this system (there are many out there that we all know) is going to be an impulse buyer. They won't do any homework on what system to get nor will they care.
I like music, and I like the idea's of having a radio and tv tuner in my box. But I won't pay the cash that MTV (or whoever building these systems) is bound to charge when I can put them in myself for a lot less.
For those out there who know nothing of computers, they will happily follow each other over the cliff like mindless zombies, just as they do today with Micro$ofts products. It's all about marketing and creating a WANT when people don't NEED it. Maybe that crazy movie Fight Club was right?
I've always wanted one of those hotwheel computers! =)
Rotations Per Minute only affects seek times as far as I know (which isn't much). That's why A: drives suck so much (that and they don't carry a Gig of data).
I suppose if you had a really defragmented drive it could slow down reading speeds.
This little buffer of 128K (a little over half is used for microcode) should keep things reading soothly though.
As a student at McMaster (Canada) there's a tonne of houses around the University that are 'swiss cheesed' with wires running here and their through walls, taped to walls (God bless duct tape) baseboards or anything else you can think of.
To break away from university life - but who would want to - you are going to have to move into a new complex. Who can afford a new home though, not this poor student?
The cheapest and most efficent way I'm sure is to get a dedicated line, T3 perhaps and share the bandwidth with other neighbours in the area (5, 10 people should bring the bill down). Check contracts for that though, some providers don't like you networking too many computers because you turn into an ISP. Don't get your connection though them if that's the case.
Competition is great.
Cheers.
Are you telling me that if I were to lean off this thing w/ my ample 200 pound frame it wouldn't tip over? What's the weight restrictions on this puppy?
This will make a good test case for nothing.
Oh, and a case of beer to the first person who finds a systems critical bug in the software for this contraption!
What do you mean it's not open source?
TIME (2015) "The scooters unite and take over the world due to unexpected flashing of ROM units by a childs PDA."